Talkboctopus Seminar: Was the Internet a Mistake? A Data-driven
Outlook for Online Jerks, with Jeremy Blackburn
Over the past couple of decades, the growth and ubiquity of the Internet, and
social media in particular, has drastically changed the world. While things
like the rapid spread of knowledge and instant communication have certainly
had a positive impact, the Internet has also enabled the spread of
disinformation and coordination of both online attacks and physical violence.
In this talk, I present a data-driven understanding of the darker side of the
Web.

I will show how we can measure the evolution and splintering of extremist
groups over time and how conspiracy theories form and are disseminated
online. I will also cover how extremist language changes and novel
socio-technical attacks rapidly manifest in response to real world events.
Finally, I will discuss the nuanced relationship that science itself has with
online jerks.

Speaker bio:
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Jeremy Blackburn is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science
at Binghamton University. Jeremy is broadly interested in data science, with
a focus on large-scale measurements and modeling. His largest line of work is
in understanding jerks on the Internet. His award-winning research into
understanding toxic behavior, hate speech, and fringe and extremist Web
communities has been covered in the press by the likes of The Washington
Post, the New York Times, and Infowars, among others. Jeremy has an
Erdos-Bacon number of O(7), has been quoted by Zizek, and has had at least
one League of Legends account permabanned.